by Richard Peck
You’d have to understand Flip’s mom to figure out how she came to this decision. Though I don’t think anybody could ever understand all of her. Like most mothers would say, I wanted my children to have a nice, settled life in one place. I sacrificed everything for them. Sentiments like that. But she never said any of those things. In fact, she never said much of anything. She just kept to herself a lot of the time and let Flip run things. The one point you could be sure of with her was that she liked a quiet life.
Which nobody in that family got when Flip’s dad, Commander Townsend, was home. When the Commander was on shore leave, all hell broke loose, and everything had to get ship shape on the double. He actually said things like NOW HEAR THIS.
I think they all counted the days until he went back to his ship or wherever. Especially Flip. I never even heard him mention his dad’s name unless he was at home at the time, when it was impossible to overlook him. But I didn’t give him much thought until one time in the summer after fifth grade, when we were still kids.
Those were the days when Flip and I were both junior members of an organization called the Oakthorpe Avengers. In a way, that’s how we got friendly in the first place—by being on the lower fringes of this gang, which was run by older kids and met in Wallace Myers’ garage.
To get in the gang you had to know three dirty jokes nobody had heard before. And after the initiation ceremony, when you told the jokes, it was all pretty much downhill. There weren’t any other gangs in convenient, nearby neighborhoods, so we didn’t have any territorial rights to defend or anything. Like all gangs, it was organized boredom. Anyway, that’s how Flip and I first got to be friends.
At the beginning of that summer, Commander Townsend was home on leave. And he about had a coronary when he found out Flip couldn’t swim. A Navy man’s kid that can’t swim! It was an outrage, and besides everybody’s supposed to know how to swim because it’s easy as walking, nature’s best exercise, and it could save your life. Especially, if you’re in the Navy.
He issued an order to Flip that he’d take him through a crash course in elementary swimming at the YMCA while he was home on leave.
And Flip, who didn’t take commands very well even back then, said he’d learn to swim on two conditions. First, that the Commander wouldn’t teach him—that he’d have a regular swimming coach instead. And that he could bring a friend along—me, as it turned out. This must have caused a major battle, because the Commander doesn’t like anybody else’s ideas nearly as well as he likes his own. It runs in the family.
But since learning to swim was the important thing, he said he’d have to let Flip have his way about it because he didn’t have all summer to argue. And that’s how we happened to take lessons at the Y.
The Commander took us down the first day to get us signed up. There were regular group classes, but he said they weren’t good enough. If the Commander wasn’t going to get to teach us, he wanted another expert who’d give us his full attention. You could tell it really got to him that Flip had ruled him out.
They set us up with an individual coach and said we could start right away. So the Commander plunked down the money for ten lessons and free swim periods. And much to Flip’s disgust, he marched right into the locker room with us and started tearing off his clothes. “Dad, we’ve got a teacher; they said so. That was the deal,” Flip said under his breath. But the Commander just kept flinging off his clothes and throwing them into a locker.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, fiddling with his shoelaces, “I’m just going to have a quick dip. I’ll be at the deep end. You tadpoles will be down in shallow water. You don’t even have to let on I’m your father.” The Commander had a very red face but a white body—in fighting trim, of course. He invited us to sock him in the belly if we wanted to, so we could see how tight his muscles were. We didn’t want to.
You swim naked at the Y—regardless of age. And we were in our modest period—undressing close up to the locker and taking our time about it. The Commander finally got tired of waiting for us and bounded off to the pool. He was up bouncing on that board before we had our socks off.
I always remember the smell of that locker room—chlorine from the pool and the breathtaking whiff of used jock straps from the gym. We paddled through the tray full of stuff that’s supposed to ward off athlete’s foot; and then, we were in the big room with the pool. Cracked cement walls and big signs that said ALWAYS SWIM WITH A BUDDY.
The Commander had done a couple of quick laps by then and was at poolside doing a few squat-jumps to get the rest of the kinks out. Our coach was a guy named Ralph Harvey, and Flip’s dad was telling him all about the Navy and generally lording it over Ralph—to not much effect.
Ralph became our hero that summer. We were at the age for one. He was just out of high school, but, to us, he was a total grownup without the usual annoying adult traits. To show his teaching status, he wore a pair of rubberized shorts—the kind you wear at a swimming meet. And the whistle hanging around his neck was nestled into a healthy growth of chest hair. Right away, we were impressed. While the Commander performed several dozen trick dives, Ralph worked with us in the three-foot end—with his back to the board.
He was what I’d call a great teacher. He put us through the paces, but he never pushed us too far. By the end of the session, we were shoving off from the side of the pool with our feet and floating on our backs.
On the way home, the Commander said he supposed Ralph would do. He suited us fine. In fact, that summer became the time of the Great Ralph Harvey Adventure Saga. In the pool, Ralph was very methodical—as we moved from the back float to more advanced stuff and finally onto the board. He didn’t have much to say, which gave our fantasies about him a kind of a free-form quality. We nearly got thrown out of the Oakthorpe Avengers because of too much talk about our close buddy, Ralph Harvey, and what a great guy he was. How any day now we’d be taking off on a camping trip with Ralph to Canada, or maybe Tibet.
Since we didn’t have anything to go on, we’d spend most of the days wondering things like if he had a girl and a car. Then we agreed that he didn’t have a girl, but he did have a car. Then we had to decide what the best kind of a car for Ralph would be. But we couldn’t ever settle on one particular model and body style with all the class and speed a guy like Ralph would just naturally need.
Then we wondered about his future. There wasn’t any doubt in our minds but what Ralph was destined to be a lifelong swimmer. After all, we’d never seen him dry. So we debated about whether he’d keep an amateur standing for the Olympics or turn pro. Which led us right into picturing him as a Big Ten college coach just about the time we’d be entering the university—where we’d all three swim our way to varsity victory. Since we were just out of fifth grade, these were our first definite college plans. We never wondered if Ralph had parents or anything like that. His life seemed too perfect for that.
So after we’d pretty much exhausted the present and the future of the real Ralph, we decided to write a book about him—just a private one. Flip was to work out the basic plot, and I was to look up all the difficult spelling. We’d more or less talk through a chapter walking home from the Y after a lesson. Then we’d retire up to Flip’s room and get as much down on paper as we could before I had to go home for supper.
Our first chapter started out with Ralph on the Riviera, lolling around on the beach wearing his usual elastic trunks and whistle. When all of the sudden he hears these screams for help way out in the ocean. So like a big jungle cat, Ralph’s on his feet and running in long, easy strides into the surf, cutting through the water, straight for the screams.
It’s got to be a girl, of course—with cramps. And she’s out there gasping her last, with the old killer sharks circling in for the finish. Ralph puts the lifesaving headhold on her and starts for shore with these long, easy strokes. She’s in a coma, of course—and a bikini.
But Ralph hears the motor of a big boat churning water. It’s th
e girl’s father’s yacht. So Ralph tows the girl to the yacht, eases her up on the deck, and gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (that’s the first word I had to look up), while her father stands by in a blue blazer and white slacks saying, “Stranger, I don’t know who you are, but save my girl, and the world’s yours.”
Well, then the girl comes to, and the first thing she sees is Ralph bending over her. And her dad says to Ralph, “Name it and you’ve got it: my yacht, my Cadillac Eldorado, my daughter. Name it, and its yours because you’ve saved her, and I’m in your eternal debt.”
But Ralph stands up, looks back to shore with these keen eyes he has, and says, “It was my duty to save your daughter, mister. But I have another duty to myself—I’ve got to be free!” Then without another word, he dives off the yacht and makes for the Riviera shore with these slow, easy strokes.
And the girl says to her dad, “Who was that marvelous stranger that saved my life?”
And her dad says, “I don’t guess we’ll ever know that now, honey.”
We wrote seven or eight chapters on our book, all ending up that way. After Ralph saved a lot of people in and out of the water—girls, usually, and once a puppy—he does a vanishing act every time because, see, he’s got to go it alone to keep free.
The problem with that book, which we called RALPH, THE FREE, was that we began to believe it. We were always believing things just because we wanted to believe them. It was a habit that lingered on a lot longer—two years anyway.
Maybe we thought the real Ralph was holding out on us, so we had to create another Ralph to make up for it. Of course, it never crossed our minds that the real Ralph was teaching two grade school kids strictly for the salary involved. You don’t think like that in the fifth grade. You don’t want to.
We even seriously discussed the idea of presenting Ralph with a hand-recopied edition of RALPH, THE FREE as a token of friendship. But since he never said anything to us but “keep your head down,” and “kick out of the water,” and “only one of you on the board at a time,” and like that, we decided we’d better not.
But the urge grew that summer to get through to the real Ralph. We figured if we said the right thing—the magic word or something—he’d become our friend. I see now we wanted to be him. I see now too that it was something like the way Elvan wanted to get through to us, but I didn’t see that in time.
So on the tenth lesson—when Flip and I were about as good a pair of swimmers as Ralph could make us, we both realized that this was our last chance. To get through to him. We were pretty depressed. Not only was school about to start again, but Ralph was about to disappear from our lives.
On the last lesson, he put us through everything we’d learned, and supervised without even getting into the pool himself. By then, he knew we could save ourselves if need be. It was a short lesson. Or maybe it seemed short because we wanted it to last. Always before, when the lesson was over, Ralph would send us off to the showers and stay in the pool for a solitary swim. On the last day, though, he was anxious to leave early himself.
So we all three turned up in the big shower room together. This was our one last chance. Flip and I were on one side—lathered up with Lava soap—and Ralph was under a spigot on the other side—minding his own business. I had the discouraging feeling that not only was he not sorry the lessons were over, but that he didn’t even notice we were there.
Flip—who was only about four-foot-eleven at the time—was soaping up slowly—and thinking. Well ahead of time, I knew he was going to come up with something to say to Ralph—silent Ralph, Ralph, the Free—something that would leave a big impression on him. And then he said it.
Flip was a soprano at the time, and I can still hear how his voice rang out on those tile walls. “Hey, Ralph!” This made Ralph jump a little and turn around. “Listen, Ralph, me and Bry, we were wondering something.” That put both Ralph and me on our guard. “What me and Bry were wondering is—when do you suppose we’ll be getting hair on us like you got all down your front?”
Ralph’s mouth kind of fell open. And while this question was still bouncing around the room, Ralph swallowed hard, and his face turned pink. He actually pulled his arms around the front of him to cover himself up. Then he whirled around, facing the wall. He jammed the faucets off and was out of that shower room in a flash. No slow and easy catlike movement like Ralph the Free.
So we were alone in there, with the Lava soap running off us in pink rivers. And the crazy part was, the tears started down my face, so I backed in under the shower head to hide them. Finally, I said, “Well, you’ve done it. You ran him off, and that’s the last he’ll ever have to do with us.” It was too.
“What’d I say?” Flip said, bewildered. But he knew he’d scared our hero off for good.
We talked it over between ourselves later. Like why Flip’s comment had had this electrifying effect on Ralph. I happened to remember that once my mom had said it was bad etiquette to make personal remarks in conversation. But that didn’t seem to make much sense because most remarks are personal, including everything my mom ever says. Besides, we didn’t figure Ralph was too involved with etiquette or anything like that.
“Maybe he thought it had something to do with sex,” Flip said. But then we didn’t see why Ralph, the big hero of all our adventures, would be shy on that subject.
Later that summer, we saw him again. He was riding down East Lincoln Avenue in a four-door Dodge. And a girl was driving. That was really the end of him as far as we were concerned.
Anyway, that’s how we learned to swim, two years before the end of the friendship between Flip and me.
Twelve
“GOD ALMIGHTY, IT’S A COBRA!” Flip yelled and fell back flat on the mud bank. I was halfway up a convenient tree before the words were out of his mouth. We were both so scared we didn’t know whether we were in India or down along Warnicke’s Creek.
And it wasn’t a cobra. It was a puff adder—what my dad calls a “hognose.” When we came across it, our faces were about a foot and a half straight over the snake, which was puffing up fast and thinking seriously about going into a coil.
I hate a snake worse than anything. While Flip was pulling himself together and darting around for a long branch to pester the puff adder with, I was yelling out instructions from my tree to get a big rock to drop on its head. But Flip was conquering his shock by trying to see how close he could get to the snake. By now, it was going into its second act.
When they get excited, puff adders swell up around the neck and look even uglier than they usually are. They may even start striking, pretending to be poisonous, which they aren’t. But if they sense this isn’t convincing anybody, they roll over and play dead. They’re big fakers and harmless, but they can scare you to death.
As the old saying goes, snakes will leave you alone if you’ll leave them alone. But we met up with this one purely by accident. It was the middle of that summer after seventh grade. We were down exploring along Warnicke’s Creek a little way above the big railroad bridge. It’s complete wilderness along there, and we were slogging through the undergrowth when we came on this old rowboat about halfway out of the water.
It wasn’t anything but a wreck, but Flip thought maybe if we pushed it into the creek, it might float. Then we could continue exploring by water. We hadn’t thought about details like oars, of course. We got behind the boat and started trying to push it down into the creek. It was dried hard to the bank, so we gave it a couple of kicks before it budged. Then it began to slip a little, and we were bent double giving it an almighty shoulder shove.
Suddenly, it shot right down into the water—and sank. And we were staring straight at the snout of the puff adder lying under it. It’s a miracle we didn’t sprawl right on it. There it was stretched out in a cool, damp, sunken part of the bank. The next thing I remember, I was up a tree and looking down.
While Flip thrashed around, looking for a long stick, the puff adder rolled over on its back, turni
ng up a cream-colored belly. It was playing dead. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Then it changed its mind, and rolled back, and started oozing toward the weeds. I kept quiet, hoping it would get away before Flip came back. But he came charging up, swinging a big stick. And the snake stopped—“dead.”
“Come on, move, you big con artist,” Flip said, dancing around at a safe distance and poking at it with the stick. But it didn’t quiver a scale.
“It’s alive,” I advised Flip from my tree.
“I know it,” he said, and slid the stick under its body at the thick middle part. He lifted it up off the ground, and the big monster just hung there, limp as a dishrag.
“Throw that damn thing in the creek!” I yelled down, but Flip was acting cute now, so the show had to go on. For one thrilling flash, he hauled off like he was going to give it a pitch up on my branch. But instead, he let it slide down off the stick. It just lay there in a big S on the patch of pale grass where the rowboat had been.
He watched it for a minute, then threw the stick down and picked up a rock—about twice the size of a softball—and dropped it on the snake’s head. Its body lashed once, looping off the ground. After that, it was still. And the rock, which was smooth, rolled down into the water. “It’s not dead,” I heard Flip say, low. There was a dent in the snake’s head, and its neck was puffed about halfway out. Flip sidestepped it and retrieved the rock from the water. He dropped it on the snake’s head again.
There was a lot of blood that time. It looked black from where I was. I said, “Don’t. Let it go.” But only to myself. Anyway, it was too late. The rock stayed on the snake’s head. Its big body was rippling again, but, of course, that could mean it was dead for sure. They jump around a lot after death. Till sundown, some people say. I felt kind of dizzy and got a good hold on the trunk of my tree. It was okay to come down, but I hung on up there.
